London 2012 and Muse: Striving towards mediocrity

That was Muse with “Survival”, the offical song of the London 2012 Olympic games.

The song is so tremendously and schizophrenically bad that I’ve had trouble figuring out whether or not Chris Bellamy has completely jumped the shark, or is simply a deliciously evil musical mastermind having us all on. I deliberated writing this post at all, for fear of committing something to public scrutiny and finding out later that Bellamy was in hiding, waiting to tear down the façade and reveal a tear-inducing masterpiece.

Here’s a sample of the lyrics:

Race, it’s a race
And I’m gonna win, Yes I am gonna win
And I will light the fuse
And I’ll never lose
And I choose to survive
Whatever it takes
You won’t pull ahead
Because I’ll keep up the pace
And I will reveal my strength to the whole human race
Yes I am going to win.

I already feel the inspiration welling within me. Except that I don’t, because these lyrics sound like they were crowdsourced from posters on the wall of an ESL college in Gloucester, not a multi-award winning singer/songwriter with over 15 years experience in creating culturally significant pieces of music.

After listening to the song several times further, I came to a startling realisation: the London 2012 Olympics is simply a highly-publicised exercise in British mediocrity. The organisers are testing the limits of ‘bland’ that the world will graciously accept in its stride. This is the only explanation I’m willing to accept.